PAGES Magazine

In the last issue of the PAGES magazine [1], there is a full section dedicated to the outputs of the last Young Scientist Meeting (YSM) that took place in Morillo de Tou, Spain, last Spring, just before the Open Science Meeting (OSM) in Zaragoza, Spain. Among the many subject being narrated in this magazine, such as the results and statistics of the football match between the data people and the modellers during the OSM, were the synthetized results of the topics discussed by the YSM-attending ECRs during the breakout group discussions that were organized. The topics of these discussions were assigned beforehand, but the discussions themselves were free and unsupervised. Therefore, the results that are now being presented in the magazine are unbiased reflections of how the new ECRs see Earth sciences and how they envision their future career.

I have collaborated on two of these reports. The first one, with Michelle Chaput (see here), was about detailing some perspectives about the future 10 years of palaeoclimatology, as they were discussed by some ECRs during the YSM breakout group sessions [2]. However, the topic that retain most of the attention during these discussions and most of the participants seemed truly concerned about it was related to life outside academia. Among the different unknowns about academic careers, the absence of knowledge of what do people go or do when they leave academia definitively seemed the most important [3]. The discussion strongly highlighted that ECRs are very concerned about their future, and well aware that most of us won't "succeed" in Science. The article I co-authored with Liv Heinecke, Kseniia Ashastina and Jessiaca Picas present succinctly the main issues and propose some way to reduce the fear experienced by most ECRs during their PhD studies or first postdoctoral experience [3].

References:

[1] Past Global Changes Magazine, vol. 25(2), 76-130, 2017 https://doi.org/10.22498/pages.25.2.

[2] Chaput M. and Chevalier, M.: What should the research questions and priorities in paleoscience be for the next ten years? PAGES Magazine, 25(2), 104, 2017.

[3] Heinecke L., Chevalier, M., Ashastina K. and Picas J.: No professorship: There is a normal, non-scary life outside academia. PAGES Magazine, 25(2), 104, 2017.